For advancements in understanding of origins of cancer, J. Michael Bishop and his collaborator Harold E. Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1989. He was educated in a two-room rural schoolhouse in Pennsylvania where science was almost never mentioned, and did not decide until medical school that he wanted to be a researcher. Years before his Nobel-winning work, Bishop had been narrowly beaten by Howard M. Temin and David Baltimore in the race to unravel reverse transcriptase. In his autobiography and history of science, How to Win a Nobel Prize, he argued that scientists need to communicate better with the general public. His father was a Lutheran minister, but Bishop described himself as an apostate.